This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Summary from Goodreads:
The New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto creates a resonant portrait of a life in this collection of writings on love, friendship, work, and art.

"The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living."

So begins This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, an examination of the things Ann Patchett is fully committed to—the art and craft of writing, the depths of friendship, an elderly dog, and one spectacular nun. Writing nonfiction, which started off as a means of keeping her insufficiently lucrative fiction afloat, evolved over time to be its own kind of art, the art of telling the truth as opposed to the art of making things up. Bringing her narrative gifts to bear on her own life, Patchett uses insight and compassion to turn very personal experiences into stories that will resonate with every reader.

These essays twine to create both a portrait of life and a philosophy of life. Obstacles that at first appear insurmountable—scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, opening an independent bookstore, and sitting down to write a novel—are eventually mastered with quiet tenacity and a sheer force of will. The actual happy marriage, which was the one thing she felt she wasn't capable of, ultimately proves to be a metaphor as well as a fact: Patchett has devoted her life to the people and ideals she loves the most.

An irresistible blend of literature and memoir, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a unique examination of the heart, mind, and soul of one of our most revered and gifted writers.

Ann Patchett isn't an author I gravitate to.  It took two tries for me to get through Bel Canto (ultimately, I loved it) and I don't think I would have picked up State of Wonder if it hadn't been a BNBC Literature by Women pick.  For whatever reason, her subjects or blurbs don't catch my eye.  However, she is a fantastic putter-together of sentences.  When I kept getting recs for her essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage I decided I'd give it a try. 

This is an excellent book of essays with subjects ranging from her childhood to her second marriage (that first marriage - whoa, weirdness).  My favorite essay dealt with the zoo surrounding Clemson's selection of her first memoir, Truth and Beauty as an all-freshman read (because wow, we shouldn't introduce college freshmen to adult concepts ever) and it including the convocation address she gave that fall.  Patchett has a good style, glad I picked this up.

Dear FTC: I borrowed a copy of this book from the library.

Orfeo

Summary from Goodreads:
In Orfeo, Powers tells the story of a man journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive. As an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, Els the "Bioterrorist Bach" pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey. Through the help of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime collaborator, Els hatches a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them.

Orfeo popped up on my radar when the Millions website released their list of most anticipated books for January - June 2014.  I'd never read Richard Powers but the description was compelling.  The situation Els finds himself in could conceivably happen.

I like the ideas in this book, all the thoughts of a life and regrets and creations rolled into a few days on the run.  Els's life was interesting and the digressions into his backstory are quite a read.  I don't know if the book was hard to put down because of the story or because there weren't any chapter breaks AT ALL (there was a really annoying perspective shift from limited 3rd to 3rd omnicient to 2nd about 10 pages from the end that was really unnecessary).

However, I seriously did not have enough information/experience in mid to late 20th century classical composition to even start to understand the things Els is talking about (I top out at Shostakovich with a little Shonberg thrown in).  Ron Charles's review for the Washington post notes how much music he purchased; I didn't actually buy anything - I already had most of it - but the Messaien went on the wishlist.  The worst sections for me were trying to make sense of what Richard Bonner was doing; it just seemed like random garbage to me.  This was a good read, but it didn't blow my socks off.

Dear FTC: I borrowed a copy of this from the library.

ETA: Orfeo has been long-listed for the 2014 Booker Prize (and it is still weird to me that non-UK/Commonwealth/Ireland writers - i.e. Americans - are eligible for this award).

Smarter Than You Think

Summary from Goodreads:
It's undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding "yes." The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and analysis. We learn more and retain it longer, write and think with global audiences, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world around us. Modern technology is making us smarter, better connected, and often deeper—both as individuals and as a society.

In Smarter Than You Think Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.

Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways. There's the seventy-six-year old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment—giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life, even going back decades. There's a group of courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant. There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade—and solved it collaboratively in only one month.

Smarter Than You Think isn't just about pioneers. It's about everyday users of technology and how our digital tools—from Google to Twitter to Facebook and smartphones—are giving us new ways to learn, talk, and share our ideas. Thompson harnesses the latest discoveries in social science to explore how digital technology taps into our long-standing habits of mind—pushing them in powerful new directions. Our thinking will continue to evolve as newer tools enter our lives. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.

Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think is one of those necessary books about emerging technoloy - the kind that calmly sits in the divide between the New Frontier and Chicken Little.  New technology is very anxiety-making: what about privacy, what about too much screen time, what about books, what about what about what about.  And some of those fears are correct (as we move more and more of our lives to digital servers and put ourselves "out there" very publicly data security and privacy are hot-button issues) but some are just hand-wringing.  Thompson has conducted an interesting survey of how new technology - specifically increased computing and internet tools - have impacted our everyday lives. And our brains.  He makes a lot of great points about the pitfalls of nostalgia and that the critics perhaps are just a bit scared.  The book has good coverage of international events and how technology was used.

I would have liked some charts or pictures, particularly when describing trends or data (or maybe what the set-up looks like for the guy who wears the camera on his glasses - how intrusive is it if people can see it?).

Asterios Polyp

Summary from Goodreads:
The triumphant return of one of comics’ greatest talents, with an engrossing story of one man’s search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait.

Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?

As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.

In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.

Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.

Next up in my catch-up-with-graphic-novels-I-missed I tracked down a copy of Asterios Polyp at the public library. A much-referenced book, so I was very interested in the story and style.

The art/drawing style is very rewarding.  I hesitate to say it has a "mod" feel, because I don't think that's exactly it, but the limited color palettes made me think of a more vintage style.  The story didn't make quite as much sense to me.  It felt overly convoluted - and I'm not quite sure what was up with the twin thing except that it fed Asterios's obsession with duality - but I liked the coverage of Asterios's entire life and how he was forced to re-invent himself.  Fabulous sequence of "everyday" events about 2/3 through.

Lazy Saturdays are necessary!

I had a lazy (but busy!) Saturday morning.  The weather is all sorts of Iowa crazy - humid with pop-up thunderstorms, tornado watches, and flood watches - so that means it must be time for the Iowa Arts Fest!  There seemed to be more booths this year than previous and any sort of art or handcraft you can think of was represented.  Painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, metalsmithing, jewelery, basket-weaveing, furniture-making, stained-glass, someone who "paints" with thread, and the guy who makes wind-chimes out of found objects (I can't decide if it was kitchy or just junk).  I've never been able to afford anything I like at the Arts Fest in previous years but I found something I wanted this year:

Aren't they cool?  A guy in Kalona, IA, makes trays, lazy Susans, salt-and-pepper shakers, trivets, etc., with this inlaid wood technique.  These were noted to be trivets but they're a little small, in my opinion, so I want to use them as oversize coasters.  I really liked the irregular chevron pattern and the little bits of reddish wood that pop.  Additionally, they were affordable.  Yay!

On the way back to the car I stopped at Dick Blick (to indulge my love of colored pens and pencils) then swung by the yarn store to pick up the Addi turbo needle I ordered (I needed a 32-inch #7US circular).

Then I hit the library.  I checked out books:

All kids' books this time around.  Dear Mr. Henshaw is one of the few Beverly Cleary books I never read - it also won the Newbery so it's for my Newbery Project as well as A Gathering of Days.  I've been thinking about reading the "Series of Unfortunate Events" so I picked up The Bad Beginning.

And then in the library basement they were having the Friends of the Library sale.  Now, Day 1 of the library sale is ALWAYS on a Friday so if there was anything super good I certainly missed it since I, and a good portion of the adult population, was working.  Day 2 is not without its merits, however, because all adult books are half off.  Check it:

The Life of Pi, Empire Falls, House of Sand and Fog, and Sula all for TWO DOLLARS.  Yup, adult paperbacks are fifty cents each on the second day of the sale.  So it's worth missing out on the first choice stuff on Friday.  The Life of Pi is a deaccessioned library book (from the library itself) and the library stickers are under the plastic covering the book; I don't think I'll be able to get them off.

It's also extra-discount week at the bookstore so I made a small, preliminary purchase (technically last night) to get me started:

The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip are the next two JG Farrell books I need to read (I'm reading Troubles right now); Siege will also count toward my Booker Project and Challenge.  I also got the very pretty two-volume Rabbit novels (one and two) set.  I've only ever read Rabbit, Run - and it wasn't so pleasant since it was for high school English - so the four-books-in-two looked appealing.

I was also conned into buying by the merch manager seduced by this ridiculously cute, and very true to life, Cat Companion Journal by Jeffrey Brown.  The front and back illustrations are reproduced in color and there are more cartoons throughout.  For the record, my cats have done probably everything depicted in the cartoons.

Hooray for new books!

PS: The Iowa Arts Fest thoughts remind me that I will miss the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival in Adel, IA, next weekend because it's my niece's baptism.  I'd love to be able to visit a fiber festival just once although it does sound like a hay fever festival for the sinuses but I'd be willing to deal for some good wool.

PPS edit: I just had an exhausting shift at the bookstore.  So much for my lazy Saturday.

Why wandering my local public library makes me sad

I was wandering the Coralville Public Library today because 1) it was Saturday and 2) I was looking to see if they had the Alice Munro short story collection with "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (the basis for Sarah Polley's film Away From Her).  The library did have Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship as well as a number of oddities:

1) Six brand-new (I mean BRAND-NEW) copies of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World in fiction under the "n"s (that's probably better shelved as philosophy and, while I understand she was the Duchess of Newcastle, no one will really think to look under Newcastle instead of Cavendish)
2) Six brand-new (I mean BRAND-NEW) copies of Vilette (in varying editions) and brand-new Oxford editions of Anthony Trollope but only one tatty copy of Jane Eyre and a number of decrepit Mark Twain novels; wouldn't it be more beneficial to replace the crappy copies of popular books rather than acquire multiple spandy-new copies of rarely checked-out books?
3) YA fiction by authors with adult books/YA editions of adult books are shelved in the adult section, not the teen section (i.e. Francine Prose's Goldengrove and the old Great Illustrated Classics editions of Dumas)
4) Adult fiction is divided into "Mystery" and "Fiction"...that's it; the library I grew up with had "Fiction", "Mystery", "Romance", and "Science Fiction" - just personal opinion, but I like that much better than the CPL way
5) People eating/drinking in the library (this also bugs me in our store, but I remember people getting kicked out of the library when I was a kid for bringing in soda)
6) Mohawk Dude (who also likes to hang out at our store, thus he has a nickname, and smells like the Dumpster at a fish bait shop) was ensconced at a computer, listening to something on his headphones, and painting; as in paint-on-paper painting - since I know this dude has pretty much no money (because he damaged a hardcover copy of HP5 in our store and told us he was unable to pay for it), what would the library do if he spilled all over the place and ruined something?  Considering my taxes and donations help pay for all the library accoutrement I would prefer that he go paint outdoors.

The library is a completely different place from when I was a child.  It makes me sad.  I loved going to the library to browse the shelves in peace and quiet with other book lovers.  Now the library is filled with people hogging the computers to download/watch anime while eating their Subway sandwiches and talking volubly about who did what on TV last night.

Sigh.